Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science

Introduction

This book collects six papers that distill advice on methodology I have given, received, or overheard over the years. They address issues that get the most air time in classroom and hallway discussions in my neighborhood. I wrote them with graduate student readers in mind, but others may also find them useful. They began as how-to-do-it class handouts that I drafted to save me from further repeating oft-repeated advice. Any advice that I remembered giving more than once, however mundane (Begin paragraphs with topic sentences!), qualified for inclusion. At the same time I omitted standard advice that I rarely had to give.

Thus this book is not exhaustive or definitive. I make no effort to cover the methodological waterfront. (Main omission: I have no chapter on large-n study methods.)¹ All six chapters are basic primers and state my personal viewpoint. None claims to summarize the views of the field or offer definitive answers. I wrote them less to promulgate solutions than to spur students to develop their own solutions to the puzzles the chapters address.

The views expressed arise more from practicing methodology than studying it. They reflect my experience as a student, colleague, teacher, and editor. I learned some important things from writings on philosophy of science and social science methods, but I have found much of that writing abstruse and unuseful. It was often easier to invent my own answers than dig them up from the reams of muddy arcana produced by philosophers and methodologists, even when the answers existed somewhere in those reams.

This book reflects my field of concentration (international relations / security affairs). It focuses on concerns that are greater in the IR/security subfield (for example, the case-study method), and its examples are IR-heavy. I hope it nevertheless proves useful to students in other political science fields and in other social sciences. My regrets in advance to readers from these fields for its parochialisms—which stem from its origins as a collection of class handouts.

Chapter 1, Hypotheses, Laws and Theories: A User’s Guide, began as a three-page handout on scientific inference for an undergraduate class I taught at U.C. Davis many years ago. Finding no primer that explained how to frame, assess, and apply theories, I wrote my own. It expanded over the years and reflects my own barefoot positivist, anti-obfuscationist viewpoint. I am unpersuaded by the view that the prime rules of scientific method should differ between hard science and the social sciences. Science is science. I also believe the basic rules of science, often complexified, are actually few in number and can be plainly stated and briefly summarized.

The subjects of Chapter 1—the basic tools and rules of scientific inference—are often skipped over in the methods texts. Much writing on social science methods assumes that readers already know what theories are, what good theories are, what elements theories contain, how theories should be expressed, what fundamental rules should be followed when testing or applying theories, and so on. This chapter stresses the elementary points others omit.

Chapter 2, What Are Case Studies? How Should They Be Performed? began as a graduate class handout drafted to escort an assignment to produce a short case study. Finding no short primer on how to do case studies, I wrote my own. I intended it as a starting point for students with no exposure to the case method.

Case study is the poor cousin among social science methods. The mainstream methodology literature pays vast attention to large-n methods while dismissing case methods with a wave. Many political science graduate programs teach large-n methods as the only technique: methodology classes cover large-n methods (or large-n and rational choice) as if these were all there is. Case-study methods are seldom taught and are almost never taught in a class of their own. (Exceptions include classes on the case method taught by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago, by Scott Sagan at Stanford, by Peter Liberman at Tulane, by Andy Bennett at Georgetown, by Ted Hopf at the University of Michigan, and by John Odell at the University of Southern California.)

I regard large-n and case-study methods as essential equals. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes one is the stronger method, sometimes the other. Hence the imbalanced attention they receive should be righted. The fault for this imbalance lies partly with case-study practitioners themselves, however. They have not produced a simple how-to cookbook for novices. With no cookbook that distills the method others are bound to neglect it. I wrote this chapter as a first cut toward such a cookbook.

Chapter 3, What Is a Political Science Dissertation? reflects my view that we often define the boundaries of the field too narrowly. A wider range of thesis topics and formats should be considered fair game. Specifically, political science field culture is biased toward the creation and testing of theory over other work, including the application of theory to solve policy problems and answer historical questions and the stock-taking of literature. But making and testing theories are not the only games in town. Applying theories to evaluate past and present policies and to solve historical puzzles is also worth doing. If everyone makes and tests theories but no one ever uses them, then what are they for? Theorizing is pointless if we never apply our theories to solve problems. Stock-taking work is also growing more valuable as our literature expands to the point where no one can take stock of the whole on their own.

Moreover, theory-making and theory-testing can be tall orders for scholars at the beginning of their careers. Grand theorizing takes time to learn, and applying theories or taking stock can be a more feasible way to start. Theory-application and stock-taking both require good facility with theories, and both allow wide latitude to demonstrate that facility with less risk of utter failure. Hence dissertations of this genre should be recognized as respectable social science and considered as alternatives when grand-theory options look daunting.

Chapter 3 also reflects my view that political science should embrace the task of historical explanation among its missions. Historians should not be left alone with the assignment. Many historians are leery of generalizations, hence of the use of general theories; yet theories are essential to historical explanation. Many are averse to explicit explanation, instead preferring to let the facts speak for themselves. Many are averse to writing evaluative history that judges policies and policymakers. Political science should step in to fill the explanatory and evaluative gaps that are left by these quirks in historian culture.

Chapters 4 and 5, Helpful Hints on Writing a Political Science Dissertation and The Dissertation Proposal, distill craft advice that I have given to students and colleagues over the years, and that others have given to me. They focus on questions of presentation and on broader questions of academic strategy and tactics, while slighting the (usually more important) question of research design. In part they reflect my time editing International Security and the many discussions I had about writing and presentation with IS readers and authors.

Chapter 6, Professional Ethics, is somewhat off the narrow methodological point of the others, but it does touch methodology in a large sense by asking: how should we work together as a community? It reflects my feeling that the social sciences need some formal discussion of professional ethics. Social science operates largely beyond accountability to others. Institutions and professions that face weak accountability need inner ethical rudders that define their obligations in order to say on course. Otherwise they risk straying into parasitic disutility. Social science is no exception.

I include an appendix, How to Write a Paper, with the thought that teachers might find it a useful class handout. It distills my advice to undergraduates on writing class papers. What should a short paper look like? These are my suggestions. I give it to classes along with all paper assignments.

For educating me on many matters discussed here I thank Robert Arseneau, with whom I discussed many of these issues while he taught PS3 at U.C. Berkeley. For comments on these chapters and/or these issues I also thank Steve Ansolabehere, Bob Art, Andy Bennett, Tom Christensen, Alex George, Charlie Glaser, Chaim Kaufmann, Peter Liberman, John Mearsheimer, Bill Rose, Scott Sagan, Jack Snyder, Marc Trachtenberg, Steve Walt, Sandy Weiner, and David Woodruff. I also thank the many teachers, students, and colleagues who have commented on my work through the years. Much of what I offer here is recycled advice they once gave me.

1. Many good primers on large-n methods have appeared, so my absent chapter will not be badly missed. I list some in Chapter 1, note 32. Also missing here are chapters on rational choice, critical, postmodern, and constructivist approaches. Friendly discussions of rational choice include Jon Elster, ed., Rational Choice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), and Jeffrey Friedman, ed., The Rational Choice Controversy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Critical discussions include Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Raymond E. Wolfinger, The Rational Citizen Faces Election Day or What Rational Choice Theorists Don’t Tell You about American Elections, in M. Kent Jennings and Thomas E. Mann, eds., Elections at Home and Abroad (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 71–89; and Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Rational Choice: A Theoretical Engagement (Cambridge: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, Working Paper No. 95—11, 1995). Surveying critical, postmodern and constructivist approaches are Egon G. Guba and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Competing Paradigms in Quantitative Research, in Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds., Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994), pp. 105–17; Thomas A. Schwandt, Constructivist, Interpretivist Approaches to Human Inquiry, in Denzin and Lincoln, Handbook, pp. 118–37; and Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter L. McLaren, Rethinking Critical Theory and Qualitative Research, in Denzin and Lincoln, Handbook, pp. 138–57.

CHAPTER 1

Hypotheses, Laws, and Theories: A User’s Guide

What Is a Theory

Definitions of the term theory offered by philosophers of social science are cryptic and diverse.¹ I recommend the following as a simple framework that captures their main meaning while also spelling out elements they often omit.

Theories are general statements that describe and explain the causes or effects of classes of phenomena. They are composed of causal laws or hypotheses, explanations, and antecedent conditions. Explanations are also composed of causal laws or hypotheses, which are in turn composed of dependent and independent variables. Fourteen definitions bear mention:

Note: a theory, then, is nothing more than a set of connected causal laws or hypotheses.⁹

We can always arrow-diagram theories, like this:

In this diagram A is the theory’s independent variable, B is the dependent variable. The letters q and r indicate intervening variables and comprise the theory’s explanation. The proposal "A → B is the theory’s prime hypothesis, while the proposals that A → q, q → r, and r → B" are its explanatory hypotheses.

We can add condition variables, indicating them by using the multiplication symbol, ×.¹⁰ Here C is a condition variable: the impact of A on q is magnified by a high value on C and reduced by a low value on C.

An example